Research teams have made considerable progress in treating absolute uterine factor infertility through uterus transplantation, though studies have differed on the choice of either deceased or living donors. While researchers continue to analyze the medical feasibility of both approaches, little attention has been paid to the ethics of using deceased versus living donors as well as the protections that must be in place for each. Both types of uterus donation also pose unique regulatory challenges, including how to allocate donated organs; (...) whether the donor / donor's family has any rights to the uterus and resulting child; how to manage contact between the donor / donor's family, recipient, and resulting child; and how to track outcomes moving forward. (shrink)

Bethany Henning argues that within the naturalistic strains of American philosophy, there is an implicit theory of the unconscious that finds its fullest expression within the work of John Dewey. Although the unconscious contributes to all experience, it plays a principal role in experiences that are emphatically aesthetic.

Recent ethics literature suggests that issues involved in non-heart-beating organ procurement are both highly charged and rather urgent. Some fear that NHB is a public relations disaster waiting to happen or that it will create a backlash against organ donation. The purpose of the study described below was to assess ethics committees' current level of involvement in and readiness for addressing the difficult issues that NHB organ retrieval raises—either proactively through policy development or concurrently through ethics consultation.

In this article we argue for the importance of studying interdisciplinary collaborations by focusing on the role that good choice and design of model-building frameworks and strategies can play overcoming the inherent difficulties of collaborative research. We provide an empirical study of particular collaborations between economists and ecologists in resource economics. We discuss various features of how models are put together for interdisciplinary collaboration in these cases and show how the use of a coupled-model framework in this case to coordinate (...) and combine background models from ecology and economics provided particular collaborative affordances and clear collaborative gain. (shrink)

This important new study presents a systematic and definitive critique of Ronald Dworkin's highly influential theory of liberal equality. Focusing on the connection Dworkin attempts to establish between economic markets and liberal egalitarian political morality, the study examines his contention that markets have an indispensable role to play in the articulation of liberal ideals of distributive justice, individual liberty, and state neutrality. Subjecting the central tenents of this theory to sustained critical analysis, the author argues that Dworkin's attempt to establish (...) deep affinities between the market and equality is unsuccessful and his proposed solutions to some central controversies in political theory are seriously flawed. This powerful examination of the work of America's leading public philosopher reveals some timely lessons about the hazards and limitations of the market as a device for the articulation and realization of egalitarian justice. (shrink)

Max Weber, the grandfather of organizational theory, recognized the close association between health care organizations and law. When he introduced the concept of a legallaw-saturated,rational bureaucracies, healthcare organizations have highly formalized rules and procedures. They pay a great deal of attention to legal criteria in decisionmaking, and some have entire departments devoted to legal risk management.

Do cultural models facilitate particular ways of perceiving interactions in nature? We explore variability in folkecological principles of reasoning about interspecies interactions. In two studies, Indigenous Panamanian Ngöbe and U.S. participants interpreted an illustrated, wordless nonfiction book about the hunting relationship between a coyote and badger. Across both studies, the majority of Ngöbe interpreted the hunting relationship as cooperative and the majority of U.S. participants as competitive. Study 2 showed that this pattern may reflect different beliefs about, and perhaps different (...) awareness of, plausible interspecies interactions. Further probes suggest that these models of ecological interaction correlate with recognition of social agency in nonhuman animals. We interpret our results in terms of cultural models of nature and nonhuman agency. (shrink)

Environmental problems often outstrip the abilities of any single scientist to understand, much less address them. As a result, collaborations within, across, and beyond the environmental sciences are an increasingly important part of the environmental science landscape. Here, we explore an insufficiently recognized and particularly challenging barrier to collaborative environmental science: value pluralism, the presence of non-trivial differences in the values that collaborators bring to bear on project decisions. We argue that resolving the obstacles posed by value pluralism to collaborative (...) environmental science requires detecting and coordinating the underlying problematic value differences. We identify five ways that a team might coordinate their problematic value differences and argue that, whichever mode is adopted, it ought to be governed by participatory virtues, pragmatic resolve, and moral concern. Relying on our experiences with the Toolbox Dialogue Initiative, as well as with other dialogical approaches that support team inquiry, we defend the claim that philosophical dialogue among collaborators can go a long way towards helping teams of environmental scientists and fellow travelers detect their problematic value differences. Where dialogical approaches fare less well is in helping teams coordinate these differences. We close by describing several principles for augmenting philosophical dialogue with other methods, and we list several of these methods in an appendix with brief descriptions and links for further learning. Overall, the article makes three main contributions to the research collaboration and values in science literatures: It deepens our understanding of problematic value pluralism in team science; It provides actionable guidance and methods for improving values-oriented philosophical dialogue interventions; and It demonstrates one way of doing engaged philosophy. (shrink)

This paper explores the connection of offshoring and outsourcing to nonconsensual global pharmaceutical trials in low-income countries. After discussing reasons why the topic of nonconsensual offshored clinical trials may be overlooked in bioethics literature, I suggest that when pharmaceutical corporations offshore clinical trials today, nonconsensual experiments are often foreseeable and not simply the result of aberrant ethical conduct by a few individuals. Offshoring of clinical trials is structured so that experiments can be presented as health care in a unique form (...) of outsourcing from the host country to pharmaceutical corporations. Bioethicists’ assessments of the risks and potential benefits of offshore corporate pharmaceutical trials should therefore systematically include not only the hoped for benefits and the risks of the experimental drug but also the risk that subjects will not have consented, as well as the broader international consequences of nonconsensual experimentation. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 4, May 2020, Page 59-61.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hyper-Abjects:Finitude, “Sustainability,” and the Maternal Body in the AnthropoceneBethany DoaneThe concept of the Anthropocene prioritizes a new paradigmatic scale that seems to outweigh that of “the political”: imagining deep time or the death of the human species as a result of climate change tends to negate the (relatively speaking) smaller-scale concerns of race, class, gender, or capitalism. While feminist critique is often circumscribed by this political scale, and thus (...) may seem to be dwarfed or rendered obsolete by the geological, deep-time scale of the Anthropocene, examining issues of feminist concern from this geological perspective has profound implications for thinking not only of gender politics but also of how to construct something like the political at all in this new era. Suggesting a new and normative global politics is, of course, beyond the scope of this article, but perhaps we might begin to conceive of a political schema that would function more appropriately in light of this grander scale. At the very least we may begin to think the borders or limits of the species as it has existed in the modern era in a way that neither environmentalism nor posthumanism has yet been able to sufficiently tackle.The Anthropocene marks the epoch in which human activities have caused global environmental changes that will leave their mark in the geological strata of the earth itself.1 While the specific moments of its onset are contested, its beginnings are generally associated with the industrial age; Crutzen and Stoermer mark its onset at roughly 1800 with the beginnings [End Page 251] of the industrial revolution. (Timothy Morton pinpoints it more specifically with the invention of the steam engine in 1794.) The changes made in this era of geological, technological, and climate convergence have accelerated in the last seventy years or so in what scientists call the Great Acceleration, which began around 1940 and quickened anthropogenic impact with events like the testing/dropping of atomic bombs, the homogenization of biodiversity, mass extinctions as a result of human activity, and various types of drilling and mining.2 In the era broadly conceived as modernity, the steady march of “progress” that has so shaped the paradigm of the period has been made possible only through its own abjections: those phenomena that mark the era as limited, limiting, and unsustainable. In other words, the “birth of the modern world” was made possible only through devastating acts of violence: institutionalized inequalities like slavery, oppression, colonization, and war. These acts of violence translate as cannibalization at the global scale: the exploitation of most members of the species and the consumption of their resources for the benefit and luxury of the few. While these forms of violence have been criticized and confronted by political and theoretical movements since at least the middle of the twentieth century, thinking of them in terms of the Anthropocene and deep time allows us to consider their consequences in a new light. Our present awareness of the Anthropocene makes visible phenomena like climate, global warming, earth, and the “anthropos” that present us with the very real eventuality of species finitude. Species finitude calls into question not just the practices of modernity that have brought about the Anthropocene (the exploitation of the many for the benefit of the few), but the entire paradigm of global thinking that is invested in progress, growth, and even in any environmentalism that calls for stewardship of the earth. The notion of care for an entity like “nature” or “the environment” only reinforces the separation between the human and its milieu, a separation that is impossible to maintain in light of the absolute inextricability that the Anthropocene brings to light.At the heart of this essay are two theoretical concepts: Julia Kristeva’s abjection, and Timothy Morton’s hyperobjects, both of which stand for a sort of insufficiency or impossibility of discourse (politics, the Symbolic, etc.) in managing some Real object or phenomenon. Kristeva’s abject is generally thought of as functioning at two levels or scales: the personal, in which an individual must cast off the abject of the maternal body in order to become a proper subject; and the social or... (shrink)

This essay review of Margaret Atwood's Payback centers on the observation that the book does not dwell on the unnatural face of interest and finance. In this era of financialization, debt has been thoroughly uncoupled from the concept of payback. The least valuable debt is the one that is promptly repaid. It is this aspect of debt—the interest, not the principal—that has attracted the richest tradition of social condemnation. As stable forms of production and exchange were replaced by international arbitrage, (...) the link between debt and sorcery became evident to observers around the world. More profoundly, Atwood's widely shared commonsense impression that consumer debt is a measure of self-indulgence does not hold up empirically. It turns out that our unprecedented levels of household indebtedness were overwhelmingly a function of nondiscretionary spending. Even as Americans owed one hundred percent of GDP in individual debt in 2008, the real Faustian bargain was not a “enjoy now, pay later” scheme for “glitzy, short-term junk.” The truth is much scarier, and points toward a different set of cultural and theological references than the ones Atwood investigates. The dividing line between solvency and insolvency, it turns out, is not consumption but reproduction: the most certain route to financial disaster is having a child. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis study aimed to investigate the emotional impact of sarcasm. Previous research in this area has mainly required participants to answer questions based on written materials, and results have been mixed. With the aim of instead examining the emotional impact of sarcasm when used in a more conversational setting, the current study utilized animated video clips as stimuli. In each clip, one individual answered general knowledge questions while the other provided feedback that could be delivered either literally or sarcastically, and (...) either complimented or criticized the question answerer’s performance. Participants rated the feedback based on the anticipated emotional impact on the recipient, how the speaker intended the recipient to feel, and whether the speaker intended to be humorous. Results overall supported the Tinge Hypothesis, showing that sarcastic criticism was rated as less negative than literal criticism, and sarcastic compliments were rated as... (shrink)

Modern integrative systems biology defines itself by the complexity of the problems it takes on through computational modeling and simulation. However in integrative systems biology computers do not solve problems alone. Problem solving depends as ever on human cognitive resources. Current philosophical accounts hint at their importance, but it remains to be understood what roles human cognition plays in computational modeling. In this paper we focus on practices through which modelers in systems biology use computational simulation and other tools to (...) handle the cognitive complexity of their modeling problems so as to be able to make significant contributions to understanding, intervening in, and controlling complex biological systems. We thus show how cognition, especially processes of simulative mental modeling, is implicated centrally in processes of model-building. At the same time we suggest how the representational choices of what to model in systems biology are limited or constrained as a result. Such constraints help us both understand and rationalize the restricted form that problem solving takes in the field and why its results do not always measure up to expectations. (shrink)

COVID-19 is reducing the ability to perform surgical procedures worldwide, giving rise to a multitude of ethical, practical and medical dilemmas. Adapting to crisis conditions requires a rethink of traditional best practices in surgical management, delving into an area of unknown risk profiles. Key challenging areas include cancelling elective operations, modifying procedures to adapt local services and updating the consenting process. We aim to provide an ethical rationale to support change in practice and guide future decision-making. Using the four principles (...) approach as a structure, Medline was searched for existing ethical frameworks aimed at resolving conflicting moral duties. Where insufficient data were available, best guidance was sought from educational institutions: National Health Service England and The Royal College of Surgeons. Multiple papers presenting high-quality, reasoned, ethical theory and practice guidance were collected. Using this as a basis to assess current practice, multiple requirements were generated to ensure preservation of ethical integrity when making management decisions. Careful consideration of ethical principles must guide production of local guidance ensuring consistent patient selection thus preserving equality as well as quality of clinical services. A critical issue is balancing the benefit of surgery against the unknown risk of developing COVID-19 and its associated complications. As such, the need for surgery must be sufficiently pressing to proceed with conventional or non-conventional operative management; otherwise, delaying intervention is justified. For delayed operations, it is our duty to quantify the long-term impact on patients’ outcome within the constraints of pandemic management and its long-term outlook. (shrink)

Much of the ethical debate about controlled non-heart-beating cadaver (NHBC) organ recovery has focused on the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) protocol. Some commentators have voiced serious reservations about the ethical acceptability of that protocol; others have argued that the protocol contains sufficiently stringent ethical safeguards to warrant a limited and carefully monitored trial at UPMC. UPMC is not the only organization pursuing controlled NHBC organ procurement, however. The study of organ procurement organizations described in this article suggests that (...) controlled NHBC organ procurement is a practice that, if not yet widespread, is certainly no longer isolated to a few organizations in which it is carefully monitored. Rather, it is being carried out under a variety of circumstances, many of which are less carefully constrained ethically than at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. The next stage of the ethical debate should focus on issues that are arising in a variety of settings as the practice spreads. (shrink)

In response to the Covid‐19 pandemic, health care systems worldwide canceled or delayed elective surgeries, outpatient procedures, and clinic appointments. Although such measures may have been necessary to preserve medical resources and to prevent potential exposures early in the pandemic, moving forward, the indirect effects of such an extensive medical shutdown must not outweigh the direct harms of Covid‐19. In this essay, we argue for the reopening of evidence‐based health care with assurance provided to patients about the safety and necessity (...) of high‐value vaccinations, screenings, therapeutics, and procedures. To ensure that virtually all non‐Covid‐related services do not come to a halt again, health care systems and physician practices must preemptively increase their capacity, secure adequate personal protective equipment to safeguard health care personnel, and develop a measured approach to reclosing such routine health care, should it become necessary in the future. (shrink)

Human connection is universally important, particularly in the context of serious illness and at the end of life. The presence of close family and friends has many benefits when death is close. Hospital visitation restrictions during the Coronavirus pandemic therefore warrant careful consideration to ensure equity, proportionality, and the minimization of harm. The Australian and New Zealand Society for Palliative Medicine COVID-19 Special Interest Group utilized the relevant ethical and public health principles, together with the existing disease outbreak literature and (...) evolving COVID-19 knowledge, to generate a practical framework of visiting restrictions for inpatients receiving palliative and end-of-life care. Expert advice from an Infectious Diseases physician ensured relevance to community transmission dynamics. Three graded levels of visitor restrictions for inpatient settings are proposed, defining an appropriate level of minimum access. These depend upon the level of community transmission of COVID-19, the demand on health services, the potential COVID-19 status of the patient and visitors, and the imminence of the patient’s death. This framework represents a cohesive, considered, proportionate, and ethically robust approach to improve equity and consistency for inpatients receiving palliative care during the COVID-19 pandemic and may serve as a template for future disease outbreaks. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine the presumption that Mill endorses a form of metaethical non-cognitivism. I argue that the evidence traditionally cited for this interpretation is not convincing, and suggest that we should instead remain open to a cognitivist reading. I begin, in Section I, by laying out the ‘received view’ of Mill on the status of practical norms, as given by Alan Ryan in the 1970s. There is, I claim in Sections II and III, no firm textual evidence for (...) this reading of Mill: his remarks on ‘art’ and ‘science’ do not show the metaethical commitments they have been taken to. Neither is there firm textual evidence for a cognitivist reading. However, I suggest in Section IV, a non-cognitivist interpretation suffers from the fault of anachronism, and is difficult to reconcile with a clear commitment in Utilitarianism IV.3 to the possibility of evidence being given for the desirability of pleasure. A cognitivist reading would not suffer from these faults, and on that basis, I conclude that we should think further about what a cognitivist reading of Mill might amount to. (shrink)

In this study, Bethany Somma argues for a dichotomous interpretation of human desire developed by late ancient Greek and medieval Islamic philosophers in response to an ambiguity in Aristotle’s account of desire.

Healthcare policies developed during the COVID-19 pandemic to safeguard community health have the potential to disadvantage women in three areas. First, protocols for deferral of elective surgery may assign a lower priority to important reproductive outcomes. Second, policies regarding the prevention and treatment of COVID-19 may not capture the complexity of the considerations related to pregnancy. Third, policies formulated to reduce infectious exposure inadvertently may increase disparities in maternal health outcomes and rates of violence towards women. In this commentary, we (...) outline these challenges unique to women’s healthcare in a pandemic, provide preliminary recommendations and identify areas for further exploration and refinement of policy. (shrink)

Many philosophers of science think scientific practice can benefit from philosophical concepts, and as such philosophy of science should play a direct role in science and engineering education. In this paper we consider a highly integrative course design strategy for integrating philosophy of science in specific disciplinary educational programmes through adaptation, operationalization and embedding of philosophy of science material to fit both the scientific and educational structure of a programme. The goal of the strategy is to help encourage students to (...) recognize the value of philosophical concepts to scientific decision making and to apply them in their own scientific practice. We use the example of a 7.5 ECTS civil engineering course which implements this design at a European technical university, to elaborate these concepts, and present some evidence on how students receive the course. We discuss some of challenges and limitations of implementing this kind of strategy for teaching philosophy of science. (shrink)

This study investigated faculty attitudes towards student violations of academic integrity in Canada using a qualitative review of 17 universities’ academic integrity/dishonesty policies combined with a quantitative survey of faculty members’ (N = 412) attitudes and behaviours around academic integrity and dishonesty. Results showed that 53.1% of survey respondents see academic dishonesty as a worsening problem at their institutions. Generally, they believe their respective institutional policies are sound in principle but fail in application. Two of the major factors identified by (...) faculty as contributing to academic dishonesty are administrative. Many faculty members feel unsupported by their administration and are reluctant to formally report academic dishonesty due to the excessive burdens of dealing with paperwork and providing proof. Faculty members also cite unprepared students and international students who struggle with language issues and the Canadian academic context as major contributors to academic dishonesty. This study concludes with recommendations for educators and recommendations for future research. (shrink)

The development of vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) presented a unique set of challenges. There was a global need for safe, effective vaccines against a new virus. In response to the development of vaccines for COVID-19 (some of which used novel technologies), there was a proliferation of no-fault compensation schemes (NFCS) for COVID-19 vaccine injuries. We identified 28 national vaccine injury NFCS operating in December 2019. Just 2 years later, over 130 countries had some NFCS coverage for COVID-19 vaccines. This rapid (...) expansion was primarily driven by the creation of three multinational schemes. The COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) scheme covers vaccines given under the COVAX framework in 92 low and middle-income countries across the globe. The African Vaccines Acquisition Trust (AVAT) scheme covers vaccines administered under the AVAT framework in 36 African and Caribbean countries. The UNICEF scheme covers vaccines administered by UNICEF in 18 Asian countries.Because of the sudden expansion of no-fault compensation for vaccine injury, especially in developing economies, more research on the foundations, procedures and outcomes of NFCS is needed. In this article, we examine how these NFCS meet the needs of individual claimants and society more widely. To do so, we first review the rationales offered to support the creation of vaccine injury NFCS. We then argue that, in order to achieve their function as compensation mechanisms, NFCS should be accessible and offer substantive and procedural justice to claimants. Finally, we focus on transparency and accountability as necessary requirements to allow scrutiny over existing NFCS and their wider impacts. (shrink)

Prediction and control sufficient for reliable medical and other interventions are prominent aims of modeling in systems biology. The short-term attainment of these goals has played a strong role in projecting the importance and value of the field. In this paper I identify the standard models must meet to achieve these objectives as predictive robustness—predictive reliability over large domains. Drawing on the results of an ethnographic investigation and various studies in the systems biology literature, I explore four current obstacles to (...) achieving predictive robustness; data constraints, parameter uncertainty, collaborative constraints and system-scale requirements. I use a case study and the commentary of systems biologists themselves to show that current practices in the field, rather than pursuing these goals, frequently use models heuristically to investigate and build understanding of biological systems that do not meet standards of predictive robustness but are nonetheless effective uses of computation. A more heuristic conception of modeling allows us to interpret current practices as ways that manage these obstacles more effectively, particularly collaborative constraints, such that modelers can in the long-run at least work towards prediction and control. (shrink)

The importation of computational methods into biology is generating novel methodological strategies for managing complexity which philosophers are only just starting to explore and elaborate. This paper aims to enrich our understanding of methodology in integrative systems biology, which is developing novel epistemic and cognitive strategies for managing complex problem-solving tasks. We illustrate this through developing a case study of a bimodal researcher from our ethnographic investigation of two systems biology research labs. The researcher constructed models of metabolic and cell-signaling (...) pathways by conducting her own wet-lab experimentation while building simulation models. We show how this coupling of experiment and simulation enabled her to build and validate her models and also triangulate and localize errors and uncertainties in them. This method can be contrasted with the unimodal modeling strategy in systems biology which relies more on mathematical or algorithmic methods to reduce complexity. We discuss the relative affordances and limitations of these strategies, which represent distinct opinions in the field about how to handle the investigation of complex biological systems. (shrink)

A request that an ethics committee or consultant analyze the ethical issues in a case, delineate ethical options, or make a recommendation need not automatically but often does elicit legal information. In a recent book in which ethics consultants described cases on which they had worked, almost all cited a legal case or statute that had shaped the consultation process. During a period of just a few months, case consultation done under the auspices of one university hospital ethics committee involved (...) interpretation of statutes on living wills, durable powers of attorney, competency, confidentiality, guardianship, AIDS testing, and disability. At another hospital, 30% of ethics consultations were thought to involve legal issues. Attorneys at a third hospital estimated that virtually every case involves legal issues. The notion that ethics consultation is an “amalgam” of medicine, ethics, interpersonal skills, and law is gaining currency. Ethics consultation has become a channel through which law enters the clinical setting. (shrink)

Anthropology of Consciousness, EarlyView.

In his recent book Rescuing Justice and Equality (Harvard University Press, 2008), G. A. Cohen returns to the defense of his critique of the Rawlsian doctrine of the “basic structure as subject.” This doctrine provides the centerpiece of what Rawls has to say about the domain of distributive justice—that is, about the sorts of things judgments of distributive justice are about and about the ways in which these judgments are interconnected. From the extensiveness of Cohen’s critique of this doctrine, it (...) seems clear that he wants to take a very different view of the boundaries and contours of this domain. However, despite the characteristic clarity and precision with which he describes the Rawlsian doctrine and despite the trenchancy of his criticisms, it is still a matter of some difficulty determining the respects in which he and Rawls are actually in disagreement. (shrink)

Abstract:American philosophy has an uneasy relationship with sex. At least, this is the central claim of Richard Shusterman’s recent article, “Pragmatism and Sex: An Unfulfilled Connection,” in which he provides for us an overview of the failures of Peirce, James, Dewey, and Mead to theorize about erotic life in any particularly “useful” way. This paper will critically examine this claim by advocating for a more careful reading of the appearance of sexuality within classical American thought—particularly as it is cast within (...) Dewey’s aesthetics—while ultimately sympathizing with the felt need for American philosophers to engage intimate experience with more frankness, respect, and focus. Although American philosophy has erred on the side of reserve, Shusterman’s misreading of Dewey’s critique of Freud, and his mistaking the appearance of Darwin’s theories as reductive, are critical blunders that paint the tradition as overly prudish, and egregiously dismissive of this important sphere of experience. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Flesh in Public:Eros and Political TransformationBethany HenningAmerican Sexual CrisisWe live in a time of erotic dysfunction: In 2020, and again in 2023, there was a brief media frenzy in the wake of studies published by UCLA that concluded that Gen Z is having statistically less sex than millennials did in their formative years. The generational angle made for good headlines, but the same surveys indicated that people of all (...) ages are having less sex than they used to (Herbenick et al.; Wellingham). We needn't work hard to identify likely factors that might have led us here. The pandemic undoubtedly shifted our tolerance for closeness and contact, which has only reinforced the proliferation of technological commodities (devices, apps, platforms) that have made isolation ever more convenient. These studies also found an increase in "rough sex" (inclusive of choking) when people do manage to have sex—which is enough to generate a separate paper pondering the relationship between aggressiveness in the American psyche, the apparent anti-feminist backlash to the #MeToo movement, or it has given some a need to fetishize/work through profound feelings of powerlessness that arise in other domains of life (Skinner and Gottfried). But I tend to think that the recent decrease in sexual activity is the symptom of a wider pathology that should be understood as an "erotic depression."In 1998, as Queer Theory was just beginning to achieve a narrow but resolute foothold in academic life, Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner wrote "there is nothing more public than privacy" (Berlant and Warner 548). This aporetic statement develops into their central claim that our negotiation of the commons is structured by a "core national culture" that "can be imagined as a sanitized space of sentimental feeling and immaculate behavior" through the mechanism of "national heterosexuality." National heterosexuality (distinct from though similar to Adrienne Rich's "compulsory heterosexuality") [End Page 51] is the tacit assumption that family life with its reproductive and consumptive activities is the arrangement that authorizes/redeems desire. If this is the tacit assumption that structures public space, we needn't go through the trouble to represent sexual desires and practices in public. We then assume that normal, healthy sexuality occurs in private. The content of intimate life is presupposed, and protection of this private life and its material pleasures is the central concern around which American politics is organized. For Berlant and Warner, differentiating between what is "public" and what is "private" isn't thoroughly explicated. In The Public and Its Problems, Dewey offered a functional distinction between the private as transactions between individuals that are "immediately and directly engaged," and the public as the as-yet-inchoate collection of individuals that are affected by the "indirect consequences" of a private transaction (LW 2:244). The public, in other words, coheres on the basis of a problem that emerges while their attention is engaged elsewhere—presumably by their own private transactions. But, if that public is to cohere and advocate for itself, fellow-sufferers must find a way to recognize one another as such and then organize around their shared interest. The impediments to queer liberation thus indicate a general hurdle in democratic life: The search for the public involves qualitative work in an affective field that is troubled by the repressive mechanisms that split the private and the public into a strict dichotomy—if the dominant customs repress the crucial affective capacities of the inchoate public, would-be political movements are repressed before suffering can be expressed.If sexual life can be thought of as one possible expression of erotic perception, and if the Deweyan can accept an analogue between erotic perception and what Dewey calls "qualitative thought," then our erotic deficits amount to a diminished sensitivity and a failure of sensual attentiveness to a crucial layer of experience as a whole. Democratic life withers when we fail to perceive the connection between what we do and what we suffer. Without these rhythms of reciprocal response, the live creature becomes hopelessly alienated. The work of Dewey and of Merleau-Ponty represent some of the most successful attempts to think ecologically, because they are willing to take... (shrink)